It Takes Me 30 Minutes To Write An Article

And it took me 30 minutes to write this one

Without accounting for finding images and researching ideas, it takes me approximately half an hour to write an article from start to finish.

How you may ask? Well, it’s simple. I write until the page is full. Since the average article is made up of 750 words, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear that writing 250 words takes about 10 minutes. I’ve come to realize that most writers on Medium swear by the fact that 1 hour is the ideal time for writing an article. But what if you could cut that time by half?

I didn’t share this article to boast about me writing at a paced speed. If anyone, I can admit that it takes me a lot longer to write certain articles that require some time to flesh ideas out. But most articles, when planned with relevant points and takeaways, shouldn’t even take an hour to write. Most of the time spent on the article is not spent writing it, but coming up with ways to write it. Is it better if I use this word instead of this one, or add an extra one here so that my point is better delivered?

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” — Theophrastus

The harsh truth is that readers will be readers. They will skim over the words in hopes of grasping the point, and a point could be made in a million ways. We shouldn’t be spending time deciding on how to deliver it the best way — we should simply aim to deliver it.

Have Your Points Ready to Go

The most challenging part facing writers is coming up with an idea. Writer’s block has been subject to cause writers to spend hours procrastinating, delaying, or even stopping their work. It’s a scary position to be in when you feel you have run out of ideas. But the matter of fact is that we are surrounded by ideas all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I used to think that I had nothing to write about until I realized that the world was full of inspiration to pick subjects from. Let me give you a few examples:

• Social media (pictures, posts, personal stories of people)
• News (articles about people, events, opinions)
• Books/Films (whether it be a reaction to or a review of what you read or watched)
• Personal Life (our lives are our biggest inspiration — we all live our unique stories and always have a catalog of memories, experiences, and emotions to choose from)
• Medium (even the very platform we write on can act as inspiration when we are fed with ideas which we can respond or add to)

The fact that we have 24/7 access to information from everyone and everywhere bypasses any excuse we come up with to claim a lack of ideas. Inspiration is all around us, we just need to learn to capture it.

Write As If You’re Reading

A technique I came to use recently is spilling words onto the page as if I were reading them. My brain commands which words to write, and I follow them. I don’t allow my inner-judge to interfere with any of my writing, instead allowing myself to write the words down as if they've already written and I am simply reading through them.

This won’t only help you write exactly what you have in mind, but also trick yourself into thinking that you’ve already expressed what you wish to express, which makes you prone to expressing yourself in the first place.

First Write, Then Review

As writers, we can be obsessive creatures. It is in our nature to want to express ourselves as perfectly as possible — leaving no room to be doubted. But we often forget that the main reason we write in the first place is to engage with our readers and take part in wider conversations. We are only human — we can’t be perfect.

Sometimes our craving to edit and sort through every potential discrepancy can lead us to spend more time on editing than actual writing. Sure, we may need to fix a few grammatical or punctuation errors here and there, but we should leave that for after we have penned our last word.

When we have finished saying what we needed to say, refining it can take place in the post-writing stage, and it takes a lot faster to do so since we are only focusing on one task. Our role as an editor should come after our role as a writer, or else we might forget our status as a writer to start with.

Writing takes credit for lots of extra activities that aren’t actually a part of writing. Searching for ideas, trying to come up with the perfect way to form sentences, and editing is not the definition of writing. They’re part of the process accompanying publishing and getting stories out to the world, but they are not writing. Writing has a simple rule in store for us: As long as you pen down what you are thinking of, you are writing.

It shouldn’t take us too long to express exactly what we’d like to say.

Angelina Der Arakelian